Toward an Economic Sociology of Compassionate Charity and Care

Donald Light
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Donald Light: Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study

No 331, Working Papers from Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Migration and Development.

Abstract: Economics and economic sociology are based on an action model of self-interest and exchange, even though tempered by structural and cultural kinds of embeddedness. People are said to always expend their valued scarce resources - time, skill, energy, money, and other resources - to gain income, wealth, or other rewards such as pleasure or prestige which they regard as worth as much as or more than what they expend. Yet there is clear evidence that people employ or give away their scarce resources for other reasons. Motives like moral convictions; compassion; love; a sense of duty such as a duty towards a sick, disabled, or needy relative or other with whom one feels founded solidarity; and principles or beliefs that transcend self-interest and even call for self-sacrifice prompt or contribute to substantial portions of economic and political action that are missing from theories of economic action and from economic sociology. Yet they are morally and culturally important, and they may underlie large societal shifts that shape economic behavior, like the rise of the movements to Make Poverty History and eliminate absolute poverty. REF At a personal level, millions of people give away scarce time and valued resources they worked to earn rather than keep them for themselves and their pleasures.

JEL-codes: D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-02
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